Packing Up in Dhaka

We're in our last days here in Dhaka.

As you can imagine, this is a pretty stressful time, even when so much of our move is being taken care of. After three days of packing, our house is now empty, save for the Embassy furniture and four suitcases’ worth of personal belongings. Our calendar is filling up with evening appointments as all of our friends ask to see us one last time before we go. Rabin (our guard) and Shanti (our housekeeper) are sad to see us go and worried about finding new jobs, so we're helping with that as much as we can. During all of this, we still have work to do -- Jennifer has some big meetings and conference calls with Washington over the next couple of weeks, while Patrick will be in Nepal all next week for work. On 11 April we'll board Thai Airways flight 322 to Bangkok.

And then there's Bhago.

Bangkok is not a good place for dogs. It's a big, crowded, modern city. The public parks don't allow dogs. We'll live in a small apartment on the 18th floor of a high-rise, with no garden space or yard. So we've decided it's best for Bhago not to join us there. We have a couple of options for him -- including sending him back to the States to live on Patrick's aunt's farm in Georgia -- but we think finding a home for him here in Bangladesh would be easiest for everyone, especially him.

Still, it's hard. We're really going to miss our little monster, and we know that no one will love him quite the way we have. He'll be fine in a good home, we know – and being a dog, he won’t miss us the way we’ll miss him. It's just tough to say goodbye.

For his part, Bhago has been awfully subdued over the last few days. People project all sorts of emotions onto their pets, so we don't want to go far as to say that he knows what's going on, but I'm sure he's picking up on the various emotional states in the house. There have been movers here, packing up boxes, yelling back and forth, and basically causing a lot of commotion. Normally this would have Bhago jumping up and down, barking, sniffing ... you know, all of that fun doggie stuff. Instead, he's mostly just watched them go by, sometimes with a heavy sigh. Jennifer jokingly said to Rabin (who spends a lot of time with Bhago during the day), "Maybe Bhago knows we're moving." Rabin replied, "I am thinking, Bhago know everything ... he just not say.”

And yet, he’s still his irrepressible self sometimes: